The Musician goes spelunking in the making
Our Beautiful Pelee goes to an Equine Painting Workshop
Cheesecake with Raspberry Sauce
I really can’t come up with a Rilke poem about cheesecake, no surprise. I actually googled “cheesecake poetry,” and discovered I didn’t want to go there either. Really, dessert poetry is hard to find….so there is a need out there! (for all you nascent poets…)
As I said, this was a commission and I enjoyed painting it. I want that plate!
In praise of painting food, here is one by Ogden Nash:
The Clean Plater
Some singers sing of ladies’ eyes,
And some of ladies lips,
Refined ones praise their ladylike ways,
And course ones hymn their hips.
The Oxford Book of English Verse
Is lush with lyrics tender;
A poet, I guess, is more or less
Preoccupied with gender.
Yet I, though custom call me crude,
Prefer to sing in praise of food.
Food,
Yes, food,
Just any old kind of food.
Pheasant is pleasant, of course,
And terrapin, too, is tasty,
Lobster I freely endorse,
In pate or patty or pasty.
But there’s nothing the matter with butter,
And nothing the matter with jam,
And the warmest greetings I utter
To the ham and the yam and the clam.
For they’re food,
All food,
And I think very fondly of food.
Through I’m broody at times
When bothered by rhymes,
I brood
On food.
Some painters paint the sapphire sea,
And some the gathering storm.
Others portray young lambs at play,
But most, the female form.
“Twas trite in that primeval dawn
When painting got its start.
That a lady with her garments on
Is Life, but is she Art?
By undraped nymphs
I am not wooed;
I’d rather painters painted food.
FoodJust food,
Just any old kind of food.
Go purloin a sirloin, my pet,
If you’d win a devotion incredible;
And asparagus tips vinaigrette,
Or anything else that is edible.
Bring salad or sausage or scrapple,
A berry or even a beet.
Bring an oyster, an egg, or an apple,
As long as it’s something to eat.
If it’s food,
It’s food;
Never mind what kind of food.
When I ponder my mind
I consistently find
It is glued
On food.
Ogden Nash
Spelunking and Cheesecake in Progress
This Orpheus Painting is much larger than the other, 36×36. The Cheesecake painting is a commission. I’m allowing it to dry because I need to drizzle some strawberry sauce onto it and paint that, but I thought I’d blog the underpainting anyway.
A few blogs ago I mentioned my painting inspired by Circe, Odysseus and the pigs. I had found some pigs on Hwy M, south of Verona. Well, I’ve been past their paddock 4 times and never again found them outside. Did I mention that they were an hour’s drive from here? (I’ve even tried calling “Suey!” to no avail.) Perhaps they aren’t even there anymore. I could of course stop by the house again and ask, but no one would be home until evening and by that time it would be too late in the day for photography because I wanted bright sunlight. So, I’m on the search for more accessible pigs and have located another. This one lives in the country around Mineral Point, so it should be easier to get to.
An exciting opportunity has come up. The State Representative for our district, Steve Hilgenberg, is going to be hanging the artwork of artists from his district in his office in Madison. My time slot is January 20 to February 24, 2010. It will be another opportunity to get my paintings out in the public eye.
I’m also trying to arrange to go to an Equine Painting Workshop with a wonderful Equine Artist, Lynn Maderich, scheduled in Minneapolis at the Atelier Lack in Minneapolis. (The thing needing to be arranged is free lodging at the homes of friends and relatives. More on that later.)
The Musician after the Descent
This is the final picture, with the guitar strings and the frets etc. painted. I’m really loving this project of painting a response to the Greek Myths. I was a Greek student in college and have had the enduring intention of incorporating that love into creative work. My central interest has always been the Trojan War and I spent years researching a novel and writing 30 chapters of novel with the Trojan War as its theme — who knows when I will have time to get back to it! — but in the meantime I’m able to have fun with these literary allusions in modern dress. (See my posting of May 2, for the exact reference to the Orpheus Myth portrayed in this picture.) I’m in the process of doing a larger painting in response to Orpheus and Euridice “before the descent,” which I will blog in progress soon.
In the meantime, here’s a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke (who wrote a number of poems about the Greek Myths as well). I think it applies well to this painting.
LOVE SONG
How am I to contain my spirit lest
It touch on yours? How lift it through a space
Higher than you to things environing?
Oh, I should gladly lay it by to rest
In darkness with some long-forgotten thing
At some outlandish unresounding place
Which won’t re-echo your deep echoing.
But all that touches you and me comes so,
It takes us jointly like a stroking blow
That draws one voice from two strings by its tilt.
Upon what instrument then are we strung?
And by the hands of what musician wrung!
Ah, sweet the lilt.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Orpheus After the Descent, Oil on Canvas, 18×18, $900 USD
The Musician after the Descent in progress….
It’s amazing how quickly a painting can come together with just a few hours of painting. I’ve decided to walk away from After the Descent so that my eye can view it afresh, before I finish it.
I was so relieved to have found some pigs for my Traveling Salesman (Odysseus) painting a couple of weeks ago. Yesterday, I drove the 45 minutes to their location, hoping to take my photographs. The sun was high; the light was good. The pigs weren’t out though. I didn’t know what to do beyond wait a few minutes outside the pen. No one was home up at the house, so I didn’t know what I could do beyond that. Getting pictures of these pigs may be harder than I thought. Now that weather’s grown warm, they may spend all their time sleeping in their barn. It’s a little out of my way to run up there very often, so I may have to start working on something else next.
Here is an extract from a poem, The Heart, by Francis Thompson. I’ve known the last two lines in particular for years and used them as a chapter heading for the novel I’ve been working on.
Correlated Greatness
O nothing, in this corporal earth of man,
That to the imminent heaven of his high soul
Responds with colour and with shadow, can
Lack correlated greatness. If the scroll
Where thoughts lie fast in spell of hieroglyph
Be might through its mighty habitants;
If God be in His Name; grave potence if
The sounds unbind of hieratic chants;
All’s vast that vastness means. Nay, I affirm
Nature is whole in her least things exprest,
Nor know we with what scope God builds the worm.
Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;
And all man’s Babylons strive but to impart
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.
To a Dead Poet
My mom had surgery to replace her pacemaker this week, so I was with her rather than in my studio this week. Therefore, instead of a painting, I wrote a poem about my belief in resurrection.
To a Dead Poet
When I recall those ‘biding in the dust,
inheritors of their swaddled parents’ trust
in falsehood’s anodyne, when earth was old
but life was young, to them the Lie was told,
retold, passed-on, established as a creed,
“They would not die complete;” they would not bleed
their thoughts into the ground along with skull
and entrails, so it went, no mortal end annul
their disembodied Self’s escape. Did you
believe it so? Despite or perhaps in lieu,
you scrawled your heart’s estate in verse, your nous
in ink, inhered in this, your life’s excuse,
and I have read your words, dear pilgrim fool.
You spoke to me through them. Lest ridicule
befall me for my expectation of
your reappearance in the flesh, my love,
I pledge that from within my grave I’ll wait
the waking of us both, to each, Heart’s Mate.
NBH
Apres la Descente
This is my preliminary drawing in paint of “The musician after the descent.” The canvas is 18×18. I’ve sketched in figures of my Orpheus, Larry, and the tigers in Cadmium Red, because it is easily absorbed into other pigments. It also contributes to an underpainting in warm tones for the shadows of the tunnel entrance. I’ve begun a larger painting of the musician and his girlfriend going spelunking, but set it aside while I took care of several commissions. I’d always intended to use this picture of my model, Larry, from the same photoshoot, in a second, smaller painting. The addition of the tigers became a possibility when Larry told me a friend of his had both a tiger and a lion as pets. Voila! It just fit the myth. So heartbroken was Orpheus, after losing Euridice again — just after he’d nearly regained her — that he plays his harp at the entrance of the Underworld in hopes that he will be given a second chance. Here is an excerpt from Bullfinch’s Mythology:
Seven days he lingered about the brink, without food or sleep; then bitterly accusing of cruelty the powers of Erebus, he sang his complaints to the rocks and mountains, melting the hearts of tigers and moving the oaks from their stations. He held himself aloof from womankind, dwelling constantly on the recollection of his sad mischance.
Fortunately my musician has nothing so dire to lament. It’s quite possible that he and Euridice might have broken-up though.
…I’m heading back to the studio to start adding some color! Au revoir for now.
